Christopher Hitchens
For nearly a dozen years, Christopher Hitchens contributed an essay on books each month to The Atlantic. He was the author of more than ten books, including A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq (2003),
Why Orwell Matters (2002), God Is Not Great (2007), and Hitch-22 (2009). He was a contributing editor to Vanity Fair, and wrote prolifically for American and English periodicals, including The
Nation, The London Review of Books, Granta, Harper's, The Los Angeles Times
Book Review, New Left Review, Slate, The New York Review of Books, Newsweek
International, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Washington Post. He was also a regular television and radio commentator.
Hitchens began his career in England, in the 1970s, as a writer for the New Statesman and the Evening Standard. From 1977 to 1979 he worked for London's Daily Express as a foreign correspondent and then returned to the New Statesman as foreign editor, where he worked from 1979 to 1981. Hitchens has also served as the Washington editor for Harper's and as the U.S. correspondent for The Spectator and The Times Literary Supplement. From 1986 to 1992 he was the book critic at New York Newsday. He also taught as a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Pittsburgh; and the New School of Social Research.
Born in 1949 in Portsmouth, England, Hitchens received a degree in philosophy, politics, and economics from Balliol College, Oxford, in 1970.
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Aural History
The doyen of capital insiders has written a misleading account of the debate that led to war
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The Permanent Adolescent
His vices made Evelyn Waugh a king of comedy and of tragedy
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Holy Writ
Recent writers on Islam need to be more stringent in their criticism. Stephen Schwartz is an exception
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The Perils of Partition
Our author examines the political—and literary—legacy of Britain's policy of "divide and quit"
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The Wartime Toll on Germany
W. G. Sebald wrote of the pain of belonging to a nation that, in Thomas Mann's words, “cannot show its face”
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A Nine-Hour Resurrection
Alexander Herzen, Marx's rival and Tolstoy's nonfiction counterpart, enjoys a well-deserved return to center stage in Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia
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Political Animals
A new book asks all the right questions about animal rights, even if it doesn't canvass all the possible answers
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The Misfortune of Poetry
Byron's dramatic life has become indissoluble from his work
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Lightness at Midnight
Stalinism without irony
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A Capitalist Primer
Upton Sinclair's realism got the better of his socialism
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A Man of Permanent Contradictions
The paradox underlying all of Kipling's work is a horror of democracy combined with an exaltation of the common man
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The Man of Feeling
Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis's comic masterpiece, may be the funniest book of the past half century
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The Medals of His Defeats
Our author takes the Great Man down a peg or two—and still finds that Churchill was a great man
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Stranger in a Strange Land
The dismay of an honorable man of the left
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An Omnivorous Curiosity
Anthony Powell, the author of A Dance to the Music of Time, also wrote one of the great literary memoirs of the twentieth century